| My dissertation examines the epistemic interaction between internal and external perspectives on one's own beliefs. For example, if you believe that it will rain, then from your internal perspective it appears to be a fact about the world that it will rain. If on the other hand you merely know of another person's belief that it will rain, then from your external perspective this appears merely to be a fact about a particular person's state of mind, which might support that it will rain only against a background of further evidence concerning that person's track record, reliability, and so forth. These two perspectives can interact because just as you can learn evidence about the reliability of another person's beliefs, you can learn the same kind of evidence about your own beliefs. I think that the interaction between these perspectives plays a central role in a number of debates in epistemology, and my dissertation examines a few of these in particular: introspective self-knowledge, the epistemology of memory and testimony, and epistemic circularity both in a contemporary and a historical context. The submitted manuscript consists of three stand-alone essays: a critical essay on transparency accounts of how you know what you believe that draws a broader lesson about the nature of justified inference; a historical essay on the Cartesian Circle that explores a widely overlooked interaction between Descartes' epistemology and his metaphysics of persons; and finally an essay which develops threads from the earlier essays in an effort to explain how you can know that your internal cognitive faculties are reliable based on epistemically prior knowledge of the external world. |
